A Photo Here, A Map There
We hope you have weathered the hurricane as best as possible. Our office is still closed due to power outages that have affected most buildings south of 31st Street, but we thought we’d share some of our visual resources we have for you on the site: photos and maps. This seems to be a theme here at Off the Grid as, last year, we shared maps during Hurricane Irene.
The photo above can be found on our Resources page, which contains information on both historic districts and individual landmarks. This particular snapshot in time comes from the Charlton-King-Vandam State and National Register Report, which borrowed the photo from the Landmarks Preservation Commission. Note the Con Edison truck parked on the street in this photo.
Note: No. 37 Charles Street (at right) was one of several Certificate of Appropriateness applications that was supposed to be heard at the LPC this past Tuesday, but was cancelled due to the effects of the hurricane. (The hearing has yet to be rescheduled, but we will update our Landmarks Applications Webpage as soon as we find out more).
These State and National Register (SR/NR) reports are great resources for historic photos and we encourage you to look through them! Even if LPC designation reports exist for historic districts and individual landmarks, earlier reports often do not include photos; as such, these SR/NR reports are great resources for easily accessing historic images.
Our site includes photos in reports for countless individual landmarks as well as these SR/NR districts:
Historic photos of SR/NR individual landmarks that you can explore on our Resources page include those in Greenwich Village, the East Village, the Far West Village, Hudson Square, NoHo, and the South Village. Looking at these pages, which neighborhood has the most listings? (And while we’re mentioning interesting visuals on our website, you might want to check out GVSHP’s recently launched “Save the South Village” video campaign on our YouTube channel.)
The photo at left is of the New York Marble Cemetery located at the interior of the block bounded by East 2nd and 3rd Streets and Second Avenue and the Bowery. Established in 1830, this remarkable East Village landmark has long since been surrounded by various buildings, but its entrance gate can still be found on Second Avenue.
If you plan to attend our upcoming “Get Crazy” film event at the historic Anthology Film Archives (tickets still available on our website) located at the nearby corner of Second Avenue and East 2nd Street, be sure to also peek through the cemetery gate to find a piece of the city’s hidden history!
One last visual resource we’d like to point out are historic district maps, which can be found on our Historic Districts page. These maps mark the boundary lines of historic districts designated by the LPC and are helpful resources to both homeowners who might like to know where their building falls within the district or just to those curious-minded people looking to learn more.
In the spirit of the season, we thought we’d feature the Greenwich Village Historic District map, through which the annual Village Halloween Parade runs (a portion of which is seen here as the orange line with the black border). Unfortunately, due to Hurricane Sandy, the parade could not be held yesterday.
As you can see, however, hundreds of thousands of costumed participants walk up Sixth Avenue. The original route, which ran from 1977 to 1985 along 10th Street when the parade was a lot smaller, is shown here as the black line with the orange border. Read more about the origins of this parade in an Off the Grid post from last Halloween.
The red line marks the boundary of the historic district; small numbers placed just inside of this line indicate the last building address located within the district. For example, if you look at the lower left-hand corner of the district where Barrow Street and Greenwich Avenue intersect you’ll see the numbers “643” and “100”. This means that 643 Greenwich Avenue and 100 Barrow Street form the edge of the historic district at that particular point.
We hope you’ll take the time to explore more historic district maps on our Resources page, including the newly designated East Village/Lower East Side Historic District map!